Mine no Kaori Sencha ‘Aroma of the Peak’
‘Aroma of the Peak’ is a celebration of tradition and is one of the relatively few hand-picked teas in Japan. Mechanization of tea production (including picking) is a necessity in Japan for reasons such as lack of labor, ease of work, and maintaining a feasible sales price. ‘Mine no Kaori’ comes from the earliest flushing plot of land in Ashikubo town. It’s ready for picking several days earlier than any other plot of land under Ashikubo Tea Works’ collective, and thus, because the farmers are all free from tending to their own plots, they can band together and hand-pick this one, to kick off the tea season and create the ‘Aroma of the Peak’. With hand picking, you can obtain a near-perfect degree of desirable leaf material at the cost of a higher sales price for the consumer, and for someone like me who wanted to find ‘excellence’ at frankly any cost, here we are. An amazing sencha, and it’s not cheap, but that’s not only because it’s hand-picked.
Aroma of the Peak is a lightly steamed (asamushi) sencha made from the Yabukita cultivar, the ‘gold standard’ of Japanese tea, and while perhaps there are much more ‘exotic tasting’ cultivars out there (grown even by Ashikubo Tea Works themselves) what you can see with this tea is the true value of terroir. Yabukita tastes great from Shizuoka in general but a mountainous area North of Shizuoka city has been especially praised since Shogun’s were in power so long ago, this area is known as Hon Yama. Grown here, Yabukita can show you something that it can’t elsewhere, it can show you what the ‘gold standard’ means, the quintessential example of why Yabukita is ubiquitous with Japanese tea, and demonstrate what falls short when grown elsewhere.
This picture can give you a sense of place, the pink shaded area is Shizuoka’s major metropolitan area.
A duo of towns Ashikubo and Tamakawa have been historically creating some of the best sencha in the country. This is due to conditions created by the location of nearby mountains, morning fog, and elevation. A compound naturally found in tea called theanine contributes umami and sweetness to the brewed tea but unfortunately is transformed by sunlight into catechins. In an area with full sun, tea will naturally tend to be bitter. In general, tea is not cultivated in the middle of the mountains because farming tea on flat land is much more cost-effective and viable, and thus most of Shizuoka’s tea is created in the Western plains, with its glorious full sun.
In an area with a lot of shade, tea will struggle to grow, but it’s because of this struggle that preferential flavors in the tea will form. The Japanese noticed this hundreds of years ago and as a result created purposely shaded teas such as kabusecha, gyokuro, and matcha. By definition, sencha is a young leaf tea that grows without any artificial shading. Due to the terroir of Ashikubo and Tamakawa, nature will create a tea that without any human intervention will have umami levels comparable to those shaded teas. Ashikubo is indeed a very special place, the teas heralding from there dubbed ‘natural gyokuro’.
But alas, we’re not living in the 1600s, and tea farming is not the ideal life for today’s youth who would rather live in a metropolitan city rather than amongst tea in rural mountains. So no one knows this kind of thing anymore. Ashikubo Tea Works is a CO-OP of farmers about 50 strong who pool their land together with a mission to preserve the heritage of the Ashikubo name. In the entirety of the Ashikubo area, there is another farm with about 8 staff, and a few small family-run, local producers (basically husband-wife duos). 25 of the 50 staff working for Ashikubo Tea Works are over 70 years old, so in the coming years, things are going to change significantly for the area as a whole.
(The green patch to the far right of the picture, close to the Abe river, is the plot of land that this ‘Mine no Kaori’ sencha comes from. If you cut out another rectangle approximately the same height as the tea field and extend it towards the Abe river, that’s the land of a junior high school. That should give you a sense of scale for the area.) I’ve put its geolocation so you can cruise around and check it out in google maps too if you’d like.
It’s a tea that when brewed in the most casual western way (weak with boiling water) has aromas which I would describe as ‘powerful, vibrant, and very fresh. Like a combination of edamame beans in wet grass syrup’ with a flavor that confirms the aroma, and adds a warm cucumber juice aspect
When brewed as recommended it has an aroma that is very pleasantly fruity, similar to sweetened lime. The flavor is quite special – it pretty much screams at you with notes of green guava, lemon verbena, passion-fruit. It’s vibrant, very fresh and youthful.
Somehow the wet leaf reminds me of Peking duck. It’s probably an excellent pairing.
Notes about Brewing:
Where do I begin? This tea has something that others don’t. You can make it carelessly and it generally turns out well, but if you pay a little attention during the brewing you can create something very special. Adding in the brewing notes in their totality would make this post extremely long, so I’ll instead drop a link to those, which you can view if you like. It’s quite in-depth. https://www.sommerier.com/?p=2698
Suffice it to say that if you want a light infusion, create a ratio of 1g tea : 57.5g of water, brew beginning from around 50 degrees Celsius, and steep for 45 seconds. If you want a strong infusion create a ratio of 1g tea : 10g of water, brew beginning from around 50 degrees Celsius, and steep for 2 minutes. They are both excellent cups of tea, and but they showcase different things.
Notes about Shizuoka:
These days Shizuoka is the major tea-producing region in Japan. It sections off into 4 main areas: Western, Central, Fuji, and Izu. Fuji and Izu aren’t really major players in the tea game so we can forget about them. The western plains area makes the volume, and the central mountainous area makes the quality. All of the best Japanese teas I’ve had in life come from Shizuoka’s central area along the two major river systems; the Warashina and Abe Rivers. The best teas in Japan grow along the tributaries which form these major rivers; these teas are dubbed ‘hon yama cha’ or ‘authentic mountain tea’ and have been famous since the Shogun’s ruled Japan. The most renowned of which feed into the Abe river.
The Hon Yama teas along the Abe river system come from the areas of Umegashima, Tamakawa, Ashikubo, and Hirayama. In Umegashima is where the Abe river begins and merges with the Daiya river. As it flows South it first meets with the Tamakawa area which includes the rivers of Senmata, Nakakouchi, and Nishigouchi. As it continues South it meets the Ashikubo area which consists of just Ashikubo river. It might not have relevance to tea but there is no dam on Ashikubo river; in my mind, the minerality flows from the top of the mountain to the Abe river unhindered, that might just be a romantic thought though. It’s right around the same latitude North where you’ll find Hirayama, but Hirayama is quite a ways East of the river. Ashikubo was the first area in Shizuoka to be planted with tea and has been famous since the Kamakura Period (1185–1333), the well-known Shogun of the Edo Period Tokugawa Ieyasu also had a preference for Ashikubo tea.
The best teas from around the Warashina river come from the major ‘Oku-Warashina’ area which includes the minor areas of Oma, Morokozawa, and Okawa and their tributaries the Morokozawa River, Tochizawa River, Kuruzeno River, Hi River, Sakamoto River, and Kuromata River. The Kuromata river flows south and breaks off into another wonderful area of the Warashina river system: The Asahina River area of Fujieda. This place is amazing for gyokuro, and I truly hope to have a gyokuro from Asahina for sale here one day.
The Hon Yama teas experience an important climate phenomenon which is surely a major reason behind their quality, this is called a diurnal shift. A diurnal shift is a big swing in temperatures from day and night, generally that the day is very hot and the night is very cold, this will slow down the growth of the tea bushes and cause them to produce less quantity of a higher quality leaf.
Lastly, Hon Yama tea grows in very foggy environments (especially Ashikubo and Tamakawa) which allows the tea to grow with much less exposure to the sun. Sunlight will destroy the amino acid ‘theanine’ over time and knowing this tea farmers can build shade coverings to block the sunlight from reaching the tea bushes. A prolonged growth (1 1/2 months) in shade will create a tea extremely rich in theanine and it will be called gyokuro. Due to the fog, one can expect Hon Yama teas to have a higher than usual theanine content which gives the teas a deeper umami and particularly strong cooling nature — a sort of ‘natural gyokuro’.
Notes about Ashikubo Tea Works:
Ashikubo tea works is a cooperative of about 50 tea farmers who are trying to keep the interest of tea alive in Japan. It’s a very youthful company. In the processing of tea every step benefits from ‘specialty experience’ and thus the coop has ‘chashi’ (tea instructors) to lead teams through the picking, steaming, rolling, and drying processes. I had first tried one of their products called ‘Mine no Kaori’ in Feb 2020 as the April 2019 crop (so nearly 9 months old) and the quality was quite exceptional. ‘Mine no Kaori’ is among their flagship products and when I drank it for the first time I decided that this should be the tea that kicks off my selection of Japanese teas.
Through my wife’s correspondence with them, I found out that we’re the first foreign buyers to deal with their company directly. What a special honor for me to show this to us in Canada. From my experience with Japanese tea over the years, I have found that as famous as Uji tea is — Shizuoka is better. I have extended family in Uji and although they don’t seem to know any tea farmers directly (as friends) they do have a strong opinion as to who is their favorite producer/company. I often get these teas as gifts when I go to Japan, they’re great BUT man would it be nice if they lived in Shizuoka instead!
The Japanese tea industry:
It’s been 4 years already (2016~2020) since I’ve started importing tea. I’ve never imported Japanese tea for resale because of the loops you have to go through as a foreigner. Without my wife helping me in the process, I guess this wouldn’t have been possible. I only finally committed to do it because of the steps I felt I needed to take in order to grow this business into something great.
In Japan, after the leaves are harvested in the spring they are processed in a factory which will wither, roll, steam, and dry them. What exists at this point is called ‘Aracha’ or ‘crude tea’ in English, the tea’s raw material. This raw material will be sent to wholesalers who will refine it with sieves and other various tools to separate the desired tea leaf product from the stems, large leaves, and pulverized/powdered tea leftover from the manufacturing process. Once all the ‘undesirables’ are taken away from the raw material, it can be sold as a premium tea. Tea merchants will buy these finished teas from wholesalers and blend various finished teas from farms A, B, and C together to have their own custom ‘sommerier sencha’ or whatever the name may be.
Blending teas and developing my own brand of ‘sencha’ is not my goal. Finding wonderful flavors with traceability is my goal. It was by sourcing from companies that share this vision how I arrived at this point. My journey with Japan starts here. Let’s go deeper!
